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The strong aversions to Hugo Chavez among many Americans -- myself included -- are more than understandable. The man is downright frightening, and a major threat to democracy in South America and elsewhere. But refusing to shake Chavez's hand in front of cameras and reporters at a Latin American summit would have been awkward and inappropriate. And the incident probably would have prompted President Obama to offer Chavez a fawning public apology for the indiscretion, which would have been far more difficult to stomach than the sight of those two shaking hands. President Obama was merely being polite.

The problem isn't that Obama is physically and literally reaching out his hand to the world's most nefarious and truly evil dictators. It's that he's symbolically and figuratively reaching out his hand to them, suggesting that merely being "nicer" to Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Syria and the rest of them will prompt them to be "nicer" to their own people and to the world. It's not an unheard of foreign policy philosophy, but it is one that's been largely discounted. A leader who seems as unwilling as President Obama to learn from history -- and I can't think of another US president who has been less interested -- is of course destinied to revisit it.

Futhermore his message is dangerously presumptuous. He's essentially saying is that the slate has been wiped clean now that Bush is gone and he is in office -- that the past actions of those dictatorships are irrelevant now. I doubt very much that Israel, and the victims of Chavez and Castro and Ahmedinejad in their own countries and around the world would consider their injustices irrelevant, or forgiven, simply because Barack Obama's in the White House.

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